To the editor:
This is addressed to the anonymous letter writer who complained about Lakehead University doing little after a reported sexual assault.
It’s gratifying to learn that Lakehead U’s top administration is going to be responding quickly to your narrative. I accept your account at face value until I have convincing evidence to modify my position.
I don’t think anyone would go public with an account like this if it were substantially false; the risks of legal blowback on slander and mischief charges are too high. I’m very sorry this has happened to you.
Being sexually assaulted is bad enough – being in the wrong place at the wrong time and having your vulnerability taken advantage of by a predator on a power trip.
However, when the resultant psychological distress is compounded exponentially by having to encounter your assailant regularly in your educational institution.
On top of that you got an unsympathetic hearing from your program chair (who has a considerable amount of influence toward your successful completion of your academic program), and ultimately had to take the dive of accepting the official label of having a disability in order to get the academic concessions you need in order to write exams and finish your courses.
The way you were treated at Lakehead University rapidly devolves into a scandal.
Even if you had had the financial resources to concurrently press a legal case against your assailant for sexual assault while you went on with your studies, the emotional and time resources you would have needed for the legal project would likely have imperilled the successful completion of your academic courses.
Talk about a catch-22.You note that your program chair was male.
Do you suppose you would have received a different, and more sympathetic hearing from this man if some female in his family had been sexually assaulted?
Do you suppose he might have been more willing to find a discrete way, by back channels, but still within the academic rules – such as they presently are – to help you out?
You note that in the semester after the rape you “faced daily harassment from John and his friends.”
If the nature of that harassment was sufficiently documented one might bring legal action against John for this harassment.
That is obviously your call, but LU president Brian Stevenson immediately grasped that if there exists sufficient grounds for you to consider bringing legal action against Lakehead University under a provincial statute for allowing the situation of harassment to develop and continue to exist then that would just compound the public relations scandal that your narrative already details.
Are there other students at Lakehead University, male and female, who have had experiences similar to yours, but have been afraid or reluctant to step forward and tell their stories? Your courage has made a good start in encouraging them to speak out.
And that’s an auspicious beginning to get Lakehead’s administration to change the policies and procedures of how they deal with the academic needs of student victims of sexual assault, irrespective of whether the assault takes place on or off campus, and especially when the assault is perpetrated by one student upon another.
Kudos to president Stevenson for picking up the ball.
Judy Petch,
Thunder Bay
